


Take me out (Take me anywhere)

by dudewhereismypie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, And Dean has a crush, Castiel is awesome, Crossdressing, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, John Winchester Being an Asshole, M/M, They're kind of rebels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 00:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4685672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudewhereismypie/pseuds/dudewhereismypie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So the places changed and the people changed, but the punch line of every one of the stories told was always the same: Dean Winchester was found with a boy.</p><p>Anyone can probably use their imagination to make things more interesting, which really meant twisting a simple fact with anything that could make it shameful. Not that Dean felt ashamed for it anyhow. He couldn’t care less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take me out (Take me anywhere)

**I**

 

Dean remembers it like it was yesterday. The excitement of his last weeks of school, how he was so sure of what he had to do to make his plans work. That soon he'll be out of there and everything would be better.

He sat in front of the school’s careers counselor, just an almost eighteen-year-old boy in scruffy clothes, a hellish attitude and no cents to his name, picking at the holes in the stuffing of the chair. It was that nasty cheap sponge that public schools go in for, and as he squirreled it out from the gaping mouth of a rip in the fabric, the counselor crossed her fingers in a patronizing air and eyed him from head to toe.

Anyone could tell she thought Dean was a waste of her time- of anyone's time, really.

“What subjects do you feel more comfortable with?” she asked.

There was a clock ticking above her head, loudly turning seconds into minutes into hours, hours that she sat there judging his life choices and hours he was convinced he had no choices in his life. He turned away from her and glanced towards the door, and through the square of glass set into it he could see Castiel. His lips were quirked upwards in a little smile and his eyes were laughing at Dean.

“Nothing, really.”

“Okay,” she pressed her lips together, making a thin line colored with pink lipstick. “Maybe you feel like you would benefit from time at a technical course or vocational, ah, facility?” she wouldn't dare say _college_. "Is there a particular career path you’re interested in?"

He stared at Castiel, and the smile grew on his face. Against the window, Castiel rolled his eyes and mouthed something through the glass. Dean turned back towards the counselor.

“Yes!” He nodded in false enthusiasm, clicking his fingers as a hint of a mockery epiphany. “I want to be the president!”

She folded her hands on the desk. Outside the room, Castiel folded in a laugh.  
Score.

 

**II**

 

In the movies, when somebody so very significant walks into your life, the action slows down. There’s all this dramatic music to let you know something important is happening, and the screen fogs up with dreamy slow motion, and the characters are beautiful and exchange these wise, meaningful looks. There wasn’t any of that.

Castiel was fifteen years old when Dean first met him. Dean was seventeen freshly completed, but really he was just anxious to wrap up school to just get out of there and do _something_. He wasn’t really sure what that something was, but if he could pick anything he loved, he’d pick music. That was practically impossible, he knew, but what boy really never dreamed of being a rockstar?

In the bottom line, he didn't have any plans besides getting the hell out of that city.

It felt like a waste of seventeen years because in the end of the day Dean had nothing. Not real friends or girlfriends. Not books or tapes or anything, really, aside his ratted clothes and shoes. He didn’t even have a family, not anymore, not since his mother divorced his father and left with Sam. Dean stayed with his father because he couldn’t say no to the man, he couldn’t left him all alone when he asked to, and it wasn’t Sam’s fault that he was just a kid that needed his mother.

And Dean wasn’t a kid anymore. Everyone saw him as just a boy, but seventeen years felt like a long way, and he was already tired, ready to get away and make something of his life. Make it worth living. He was ready to put that as a milestone of _then_ and _now_ , and in the _now_ he was going to build he’ll have everything, he’ll be _someone_.

Castiel was only fifteen but he dreamed as high as Dean.

When Castiel transferred to the Lawrence’s public school, Dean was fairly a celebrity in a twisted kind of way that only a gossip repeated and changed in every mouth could get you famous for, because he was right in the top of his own personal scandal. The word getting around was that Dean Winchester wasn’t the ordinary cowboy-who-gets-the-prom-queen kind of boy, although everyone could say he definitely could, and out of the ordinary wasn’t something to be encouraged in this kind of town.

You could say, actually, that the rumors going around about him were mostly fairly accurate. But not entirely, see. Some people said he’d been found inside the janitor closet but that was just a Hollywood cliché; there were groups that had absolute sure he got caught in his neighbor yard, but that was just really dumb; others said no, it was in the woods by the school, but grass always made him itchy so that was not even an option for a start of any story. Some people said the principal had found him; some people said the cops; some people – still sticking with the neighbor story – said it was John Winchester himself, and that he’d tried to get Dean with his hunting rifle when he’d seen.

So the places changed and the people changed, but the punch line of every one of the stories was always the same: Dean Winchester was found with a boy.

Anyone can probably use their imagination to make things more interesting, which really meant twisting a simple fact with anything that could make it shameful. Not that Dean felt ashamed for it anyhow. He couldn’t care less.

Truth was, they weren’t at the janitor closet or in the woods. Weirdly boring enough, they were in his bedroom. And it wasn’t the principal or his dad or even the cops; much more predictably, it was Mrs. Olsen, the lady next door that insisted on checking over him when his father wasn’t around, which most of the time he didn’t, even if Dean said he was old enough to get by alone, thank you very much. And when she found them and told his father, it never really crossed her mind that they weren’t actually _doing_ anything, that’s the funny part of it all.

The thing is, if anyone find two naked boys in bed, they’re going to automatically assume they’re having sex even if the truth is much more innocent. Now, he’ll admit it looked sketchy, but still, just because two people are nude together it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re about to do it. But he guesses it does make a fairly strong case.

That’s about the thought process Mrs. Olsen went through and his father just jumped in with no second thought. It might even have been that little bit of ambiguity that did the trick, because sometimes the doubt is more scary than the truth. The idea that his son was just doing a little exploring – a little kissing and touching – probably wouldn’t have made it better for John, but it definitely wouldn’t have made it _worse_ , unless he really believed that we were just huddling together for warmth, or something equally ridiculous.

But anyway, John made his choice and promptly had a nervous breakdown, making Dean lost his shit in a collateral effect of two days being in the end part of stinky looks and surly remarks. It didn’t help that Mrs. Olsen was saying for anyone that wanted to hear (which meant everyone) how it was John’s fault, because he was never home and Dean had to grown up with no influence of a right role model, and of course all boys go through phases, and that’s all this _was_ , a _phase_ , but even so, was he happy that his own flesh and blood was now the town pariah?

It was the understatement of century to say that things got ugly, so Dean made his bags and took the bus across the town to live with Bobby, a long family friend, from the times Dean still had a family and Bobby had one too, although Bobby lost his own in a more permanent way.

The extension of acknowledgment Bobby gave for that whole mess was summed up in him saying “lock the door before doing your damn things” and Dean was okay with that. He just would have to wait till the end of school year and get out of there.

But anyway, Castiel was fifteen when he came to Dean’s school, about two weeks after the scandal that made the old grandmas at the churches talk to all their kids they should stay away from Dean, and even though Castiel had been relocated to that tiny town from a similar kind of nowhere, Dean could still tell that boy was different.

In that little town’s little school, the whole student body was so lumped together that any addition slightly out of the common place traveled in a mix of excitement and terror, and his arrival caused such a fucking stir that of _course_ every one of them were soon groping about any detail they could find about him. So it wasn’t really a surprise that not a day after there were a group of people already clapping at his shoulder, calling him for lunch, and everybody knew they wanted to be cool by proxy, because the new kid was undeniably what a small town teenage rebels could call cool.

Dean had a glimpse of the boy, here and there, but he never _really_ saw him until almost a week after.

There was these benches right at the school front, after you got down the eight-steps high entry, and they were more of a splintery wooden platform, really, apt to buckle under the feet of the fatter kids, but Den will never forget the sight of him laying down there after the ring of bells, his arms flexed up to hold a notebook and a pen scrabbling it. He had a smile, just a little half-moon tickling away at the corners of his lips. He was beautiful, and for the first time Dean meant that word with a full mouth.

He looked older than fifteen, but not over than eighteen. He had a hair that changed from dark black to a gold-ish brown depending on angle or how the light caught it, and it seemed never to decide itself, but his eyes were always blue, alight, alive and sparkling. His fingernails were painted black – on a _boy_ – and Dean could hardly stop staring at him for the whole time he took shuffling from the school’s entry to the sidewalk. It was a matter of luck he didn’t tripped over anything because he wasn’t even aware he had crossed the whole way until he stumbled on a tree.

Very graceful.

At that point, even for someone not a week fully completed inside the school, that boy must already know the entire story that trailed behind Dean whenever he went. The whispers still never stopped, nor the laughs, not the _looks_. True that two or three made pretty clear they wanted to be the next person in Dean’s bed, but the major amount held such a despicable verdict of Dean that they always told the story a warning; of course they had to warn the new boy, _stay away from the faggot_. But the reality was that from then on Dean waited with bated breath to find out whether or not Castiel would ever approach him and mention the rumors about Dean, if they were true or which part of that was a lie— if he wanted to be the next. He actually had a recurring fantasy in which he cornered him in the janitor’s closet and asked him to perform a re-enactment, but that was something he would never be willing to admit.

Anyway, right there and easy like that, Dean was completely sold. From the minute his spaceship landed, Dean jumped in, and he would go far and say that for the first time he had a _crush_ even if he had never talked to him. Never mind the boy in his bedroom; Dean never spoke to him again.

 

**III**

 

Dean kept his senses open to all he could get about Castiel, and collected stories and the little facts that observation could get you in the same way kids collected coins or stamps. That was somehow easy, because for some time Castiel was the hottest topic on the school, as you could guess it’d be in a small town school. The impressive thing, though, was that the word on the hallways said Castiel had moved from Illinois to live with his grandmother because he’d been kicked out of his old school and had been kicked out of home- and though nobody exactly knew why and Castiel himself never told, the rumor was that he’d been found in a compromising position with a teacher. And although Castiel never once confirmed or feed those rumors, he didn’t deny it either. He just smiled, that little smile of his, and shrugged just one shoulder with a charming air that couldn’t belong to any other boy.

Really, Dean liked him already.

 

**IV**

  
  
  
Castiel became a kind of celebrity in every corner of the school. He confused the teachers and therefore scared them; he sat in his classes as silent as a ghost but still, somehow, as disruptive as the sense of being haunted by one. He was stupidly smart yet he refused every club invitations or monitoring chances, even if it earned him credits. He became a common fixture laying on the grass or the benches, just laying, facing whatever it was upright—ceiling, trees, sky, and scrabbling things down on that notebook he always had. There always seemed to be this glint on his eyes, like he was mulling over some great secret that, everybody suspected, they were the butt of.

In his second week of school, he begged and wheedled and cajoled the principal into letting the school have its own soccer team. He then steadfastly refused to join it, and when the boys were practicing, he would linger around the edges of the field and smirk and write. There was a look on his face that confirmed that he could have run circles around all of them, if he wanted to – but he didn’t.

The school erected two goalposts, traced the field in white markings, put up bleachers. Dean got in the habit of watching the soccer team himself, but always sat a respectable distance away from Castiel– just in case of course. He didn’t really wanted to look like a stalker.

Actually, he’d kind of given up. He had decided that whatever magic Castiel had within him was far beyond Dean’s own, and so he dismissed him as an impossibility, something so far beyond his reach that he’d be better off without the torment of trying. Looking back, he’s glad he did that. If he hadn’t finally started to ignore him then in one particular day he wouldn’t have leant over Dean and said:

“What are you looking so stuck up about?

“Huh?” Dean felt himself frowning, looking up to a glint of a mischievous blue. He came closer and grinned at Dean, a cartoon of apple juice in his hand, notebook closed in other.

“You heard. You’re not jealous of them, are you?” he gestured towards the field with the slightest flick of his head. “Look at them. They’re like a herd of fucking cattle. I’m surprised cobwebs haven’t grown over those goalposts.”

“No,” Dan muttered defensively. “That’s why are you watching? Thinking about the star you could have been?”

He snorted, and did something Dean know he didn’t imagine it: he shot him a quick, appreciative little look. “They wish. They need somebody to pop the cherry on those goals, but it’s not going to be me.” His eyes flickered up and down at Dean’s face, taking all in but never resting. “I’m Castiel.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m Dean.”

Castiel smiled. “I heard about you, Dean.” He took a sip from the straw and pecked it between his teeth when he smiled.

“Yeah?”

“Uh huh.” He nodded, licking his lips. “Rumor has it, you were caught on woods… or in the janitor closet.”

“My bedroom, actually,” Dean countered, shrugging slightly. “Not that it matters. And rumor has it you were caught in the classroom.”

“Really? Someone said it was in the woods,” he shrugged one shoulder, lazily, “Not that it matters.”

“With a—”

“With the PE teacher.”

“Wearing—”

“My sister’s skirt.” He leant back against the bleachers, stretching his back like a cat and looking up at the sky. He was smiling, almost laughing, “What, did you read the press release?”

Dean doesn’t know what it was – maybe just that way he sprawled out, just the right degree of unstudied, or maybe just the tone of his voice – that lazy, don’t-care tone – but he got up and it was in front of him, leaning forwards suddenly, seized by inspiration and that flick of excitement blowing in his veins, that feeling of being _alive_.

“You wish there was a press release, don’t you?” Dean asked, dropping his voice in barely a whisper. “And interviews, and cameras. You wish it was something you could give an autograph for. You’re not happy unless everybody is scandalized, has it rubbed on their faces, and knows how you don’t give a shit about what they think.”

He was quiet. Sliding his eyes to Dean’s, for the first time since he’d walked into that school, he looked just a little uncertain.

“Are you?” Dean added, a little lamely, trying to jerk an answer out of him, “Because if you are– I mean, it’s alright. Because I’m the same. That’s what I mean. I’m the same as you.”

“The same as me?” he asked slowly, “What am I, if you’re the same?”

He was looking at Dean in a undivided kind of pressure that one could have only narrowing down all his focus, and Dean swallowed dry suddenly nervous, feeling just an insect under the magnificent glass. He felt as if that encounter was a first test that he had to pass or all would be ruined. “The kind of person who…” he bit his lip briefly, “The kind of person who’s going to leave this town, and never come back. You’re going to leave this place. With me.”

Castiel ditched his box of juice. “Shit,” he said gently, “I thought you’d never ask.”

He smirked; Dean smirked with him. And Dean just wanted to touch him, really. Castiel shone. Dean looked at him and he knew, straight away; he was it.

 

**V**

 

From that moment onward, there was no Dean and no Castiel, no him and no he: there was simply an _they_ , a _them_ that served as all the definition they needed and Dean fell into him like a freefall in deep space.

Sometimes he would tell stories about growing up in Illinois: about how the trees looked like in the winter, and how the air felt, and how the snow soaked up— he said even there snow seemed a boring thing when in the mountains it jagged in the tops like they were tearing holes in the sky, leaking clouds; he told about the quiet, and the stillness, and how it made him want to scream.

“And here?” Dean asked.

He grunted. “Worse,” he said.

 

**VI**

 

Dean would never admit how sometimes Castiel could wake the shy part of him, that part that most girls would awed and called adorable but really just made him annoyed at himself. He hated feeling so flustered about anything, but once he was not afraid anymore, once he let himself just _be_ , he reigned it and learned how to make Castiel really laugh. Quite unlike the dry cackle he reserved for those he thought little of, his real laugh was a full, genuine, happy sound that betrayed his youth and how sometimes he posed as an adult. Sometimes even Dean was fooled but in the end they were just boys.

Castiel was a beautiful boy, though. Sometimes Dean felt like he only got him to himself as much as he did because everybody else was so confused by him, so scared of him. And he could change and morph and it all looked so natural to him, so _beautiful_. When he painted his nails and grew his hair long enough to make soft curls, or when he darkened his already expressive eyes with layers of black liner or he used old clothes from the last decade he bought on garage sales-- it was all like watching stars expanding, morphing, glowing blinding. The first time Dean saw him in a dress, he gaped, and Castiel grinned with the first hints of real shyness Dean ever saw.

“You think I look good?” he asked softly, “Like this? You think everybody would laugh at me?”

At that time, Dean was almost convinced he would screw himself and kiss him senseless right there, right then. Castiel stood in the dim light of Dean’s bedroom, an old tool room on Bobby’s house, and his hands self-consciously flattened the deep gray fabric molding his body. Dean didn’t think Castiel even knew that he was irresistible, and how could Dean himself wrap his head around of how inevitable was falling for him?

Dean took in long legs, a slender waist; Castiel stood and tried not to fidget whilst Dean’s eyes got every second drinking him in, every perfect inch of him.

“They won’t laugh,” he managed to say, rushed and quiet. “Nobody– nobody would laugh.”

“But if they do?” he asked, and grinned, “No, I know. I don’t care if they laugh. I’ll deal with it.” He shrugged one shoulder, the way he always did.

 

**VII**

 

Dean didn’t know why it never occurred to him, but they were so alone. After his initial rush of celebrity faded, Castiel found himself a misfit in exactly the same way Dean was. Castiel was the most beautiful and interesting boy in the school, in the whole town really, but he never had a girlfriend or boyfriend and hardly a friend, and the more he stuck out the more hostility he attracted. Suddenly his strangeness turned him from a high school messiah into a pariah, and from the blasé way he took this change, Dean knew it had happened before. Imagining him lonely and almost defenseless was hard, but it became the only option. Especially when it’d be a whole school year till Castiel got out of there, when Dean was already barely out now.

 

**VIII**

 

“You know what really gets me angry?” Castiel whispered into the darkness. It was a school night and he was supposed to have been asleep hours ago. “I’ve got five brothers,” he continued, “And I’m the youngest. The rest are all working as doctors, studying to be doctors, or studying to be studying to become doctors. Before my mother sent me here, my oldest brother told me I should forget about being a writer. He said, ‘you know what books are, in the big scheme of things? Nothing but a little shard of stone. And that’s it, that’s all you’ll ever be’.”

When he slept over in Dean’s bed, they always started back to back, gluing heats through layers of clothes. Now though, Dean felt the drag of the covers against his body as Castiel turned over, and squinting into the darkness, Dean turned too. The blankets bundled between them, giving off the comforting smell of wool, and he imagined they both folded up like that in the darkness, like two complemented parenthesis.

“What did you say back?” Dean asked quietly. He saw a line of moonlight brush over Castiel’s face and he wished there was more he could see.

“Nothing,” he admitted softly. “I just got on the bus.” He sighed, fumbling for Dean’s hand in the blankets and taking it loosely by the wrist. “Why is that a bad thing? Being… _different_. Why people make it so hard for me just to be me?”

Dean was quiet for a moment, thinking about that. Castiel’s hand was still on his wrist, and he shifted so that they were palm-to-palm instead. He glanced at him uncertainly, but Castiel didn’t move it and after a moment he carefully laced their fingers together.

“It’s alright to be different,” he told him, “And nobody’s going to remember your brothers when they’re dead, but they’ll remember you. They’re nothing compared to a story that people can hold on when they’re feeling sick or scared or lonely. I think a good book lasts a lot longer than all the doctors in the world put together.”

 

**IX**

 

On a Saturday afternoon during Dean’s last year of school, Castiel sat cross-legged on Dean’s bed with an imaginary microphone held to his mouth.

“When did you first realize that you were destined for glory?” he asked, completely deadpan. Dean looked into his face, but his eyes were shining with sincerity; behind the slight flush on his cheeks, he could see his need for him to participate in his little game. So he did the only thing he could do: He smiled with nonchalant air and leant back against the wall.

“I always knew,” Dean said in feign seriousness, “Ever since I can remember, I just felt it, I knew I was born to do music. You’re either made for this lifestyle, or you’re not. The most important part is just to not be scared.”

“What is there to be scared of?”

Dean hesitated. “Losing everything.” Castiel sat back, interested, and nodded. “But maybe it’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”

He won a wide, excited-looking smile. With deepest seriousness, Castiel mimed pressing the microphone into Dean’s own hands. He squeezed his fingers around it and looked at him expectantly.

“Castiel, when did _you_ first realize that you were going to write best sellers?”

“I always felt it,” he said slowly, “But it got real when I moved to LA. Dean and I were living in this run-down little apartment together. He was performing every night in these little live houses, I was handing manuscripts of my stories, and I just knew that I was exactly where I was meant to be.”

“You lived together?” Dean asked, feigning surprise, “Were you best friends, or something more?”

“An interviewer wouldn’t ask that!” Castiel laughed, but Dean continued to hold the make-believe microphone in front of his mouth, raising his eyebrows. And Castiel sighed and smiled.

“You could say he has always been in love with me.” he said, and Dean tackled him onto the bed, holding him down between laughs that didn’t stop even when Castiel hit him in the ribs.

“When you graduate,” he whispered when they calmed down enough, lying in front of each other, “Will you wait for me?”

“You know I will.” Dean’s hands slipped away from the now-cold blankets to his shoulders, sliding his arm, reaching his hand. Silence hung thick as fog, a different kind of quiet and Dean focused on his eyes, the way they glowed in the past thrill of laughter, like party lights.

Dean knew in that moment that he hadn’t done it with his teacher, that he hadn’t done it with anyone. It was a rumor, just that, although he couldn’t think of a reason why Castiel hadn’t told him the truth. It was written all over him, in the nervous energy spiking and rolling away from him.

Dean liked Castiel _too much_. It felt immense in chest, it felt like exploding his whole body if he tried to repress. Castiel was so rare and precious, he made him feel special just by being with him. He was like an otherworldly being that happened to fell on Earth, in that little town, by pure accident. He didn't belong and he liked him for that more than anything. Oh, he knew in the cold reality that he was just another boy like himself, but why would he want to highlight the truth when the feeling he got was so much more exciting? And why would that feeling be any less truth? Castiel could have come from the stars for all he knew. The more he thought about him that way, the more he was convinced that he simply couldn’t be of this world. He was too extraordinary, too sweet.

Dean stared at him, long and dazed, until in frustration Castiel grabbed his shoulders and kissed him.

The crush of his mouth, of his skin, his heat. It all tangled up in a vortex that was swallowing him down and he felt tremble, he felt weak under of how bigger it felt, bigger than himself. Dean felt the heat of his anxiety even as he pulled away, still breathing heavily, his cheeks flushed and beautiful and alive. It wasn’t Dean’s first kiss, and he couldn’t pretend it was, but it was a promising kiss. It was a kiss to grow up on. His first kiss with Castiel; the first time he kissed and he really meant it. The first time anything had meant anything at all.  
  
“Tell me about it,” he whispered, and the words fell into Dean’s lips.

“You’re a star.”

 

**X**

 

“What are you gonna do now?” Bobby grunted putting the plate of pasta in front of Dean’s hands. It was their usual dinner because Dean never learned too much variety on the kitchen. “Work? College?”

“College, right.” He snorted without humor, and picked a mouthful of the noodles, chewing enough. “I applied to some odd jobs. No answer yet.”

“You could work in the garage with me.”

“Yeah?” he looked up at Bobby, raising his eyebrows.

“It ain’t the damn disneyland,” Bobby rolled his eyes. “but it’ll do till you find something better.”

Something better, Dean thought, something better. He could work there till Castiel got out of school.

 

**XI**

 

On Castiel's school break they didn't had much to do. Dean would work and Castiel would wait for him. Some days they would go to walks, watch old movies or just stay in Dean's room. It was around that time that Castiel started to read his stories aloud to him, and Dean would close his eyes, head dropped on Castiel's lap; he would travel lands, worlds, all lulled by his voice and his fingers on his hair.

It was one of those days that Dean laid him down bare on the tousled bed. He could hear the rain hammering down upon the roof and when he’d think of fresh starts he would forever think of rain. It was what it felt— just a start. That milestone that would put the _then_ behind his back, except that in the _now_ that started he already had something. He didn’t have nothing anymore. He had Castiel.

“Is this alright?” Dean asked him softly, breathing quietly as his words, fingers trailing from his knee to his hips, slowly, very slowly while lying over him. The rain brought the damp air with it, and the little room grew humid, smelling fresh and so, so good. It made it a little colder but Castiel’s skin was warm, and Dean felt immersed in a summer night.

“This is what other people always thought we did,” Castiel answered, hooking his fingers in the hem of Dean’s T-shirt and helping him to pull it over his head. He let it fall and smoothed the lines of Dean’s neck, his shoulders, his arms, down till he found his hands. He held them, and brought one to his mouth, putting kisses in his knuckles, “and what I ever wanted.”

He wasn’t shy; they weren’t. If Dean thought about it, there was nothing more natural to the two of them, just being together. And it was the most exquisite thing, how they simply knew each other and got each other, that this little piece fell into place as smooth and soft as leaf drying out from a tree—they didn’t needed to explain themselves, not a why or how; they just _were_.

 

**XII**

 

In his last school semester Castiel got a call from his mother, saying his college fund was still his if he wanted, that she “didn’t wanted him to have some ridiculous minimum wage job” and “have no real education”. Real air quotes and all. He said it to Dean with a kind of troubled look and the ticks of biting nails and pacing feet that told Dean he wanted to take it, but he didn’t think he should. Maybe it wasn’t the most righteous thing to do, especially if doing it would intend Castiel agreed to all her terms on that story, but oh, he wanted to. Especially because she was now conformed with her twisted son, and she wouldn’t force him to go into pre-med; and so he could study to be a writer, like he really wanted to, always wanted to.

“I have to tell you something.” he murmured then, very quietly, not looking at Dean. He was pacing again, rubbing his palms together. “I let everyone believe it, but there was never anyone before you. I didn’t move here because they caught me with a teacher.”

Dean nodded, snorting between a smile. “Yeah… I know, Cas.”

Then Castiel stopped in his track and looked up, eyes wide for a fraction of second. He melted on the second blink right after, smiling. “Of course you knew…” Shaking his head, Castiel seemed a bit more like himself. “Truth is, the reality is much more boring.”

“Tell me,” Dean caught his hand, tugging Castiel till he sat beside him on the bed. “I want to know.”

Castiel used that hand to entangle their fingers and licked his lips, frowning as if considering how to start.

“I never wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to write and I liked to flirt with guys and do things that guys shouldn’t.” He started, shrugging just one shoulder. “One day I went to school wearing my sister’s clothes. It wasn't the first time that I used them, but I never did it out of the house. I didn’t really get to watch any classes because they called my mother after I got into a fight with some stupid jocks making fun of me first thing in the morning. She was _so_ pissed. Said she didn’t raise me to be a freak, asked why I couldn’t be normal, why I couldn’t be like my brothers.”

“What did you say?”

“Normal is so boring.” he laughed, a little stiff, “I mean, she always thought I was just being a rebellious prick just to piss her off, that it would all just go away sooner than later. That one day I’d just woke up and _puff_ , be straight and be a doctor. I think she never took me seriously until then, when the whole town was talking about me wearing a skirt and how I was a faggot and a whore. So she sent me here.” He made a vague wave with his unattached hand; here— the nowhere he could be the freak without shaming her, Dean read.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked, frowning when Castiel looked a little surprised, in a comic kind of way that made him smile that other little smile, the one he always had when he discovered something funny where it shouldn’t be.

“How can you not know that?” Folding one leg on the bed, he turned towards Dean, leaning till he caught his eyes, till his nose reached Dean’s cheek. He whispered then, nosing him, “I thought you’d never give me a second glance.”

“That’s so stupid,” Dean said, softly, closing his eyes, turning to kiss his lips, thinking, _you were the only person I was really looking at_.

Dean earned an open mouthed kiss that got him falling on the mattress, Castiel’s body covering his own with a grace that fluttered his stomach as if he wasn’t pinned against his own bed but falling at a thousand miles per second. “I like it,” Dean confessed, then, whispering to his lips between the licks of mouths and tongues, “that no stupid teacher touched you. He wouldn’t deserve it.” _No one deserves it,_ he thought then, _and I just do it it because I can’t not to._

 

**XII**

 

Castiel decided to accept his mother's offer and with his grades he wouldn't have any trouble getting in a good college. He still hadn't decided which one, but he decided to go. It was a phrase that stuck with Dean for hours, days, rolling and rolling inside his head because he was always the kind of person that when worried about something could never let it go. He was almost nineteen then, and the little money he had came all from his savings working at the garage, because Bobby refused to have him paying for anything and, even if his father hadn’t decided he wasn’t his son anymore those years ago, at his age John wouldn’t give Dean a damn thing, much less money to move out and follow his boyfriend.

Castiel was going, and Dean had promised to wait for him, but really, was Castiel going to wait for Dean?

Dean felt something nagging inside his head, something poking at his brain and saying, with a voice much similar to that counselor he once saw, that couldn’t just _go_. Not without any plan, or anything really, leaving the little beacon of security he had found, that little system that worked better than not, for a freefall in a city much bigger with _nothing_ waiting for him, no job, not school. Not two years back, when he was dreaming about leaving with Castiel for the first time, he’d never think twice, but the slap of reality caught him up very, very quickly. He learned it the hard way that surviving was expensive and very complicated for people like him.

And if Castiel went alone, then… Then, Dean would be just past. And he couldn’t bear that thought, but still his head was handling some kind of massive torture against him, making all those little movies passing through right behind his eyelids every time he closed his eyes and went to sleep. In those movies Castiel was happy, drinking with some rich smartass with British accent (because that just trademark for douchebags in his head), and they were kissing and they were happy, Castiel was _happy_ without Dean. And one day Castiel would laugh and say “I had a boyfriend in high school but it didn’t mean anything.” Dean wouldn’t mean anything. It stung, even the possibility made only by his jackass of a brain picking at his own insecurities.

But Dean just knew that if Castiel went without him, they wouldn’t be a _we_ anymore. And it felt so, so lonely.

“You said to me,” they just had finished eating and Dean was so tired for the work day that he just let Castiel pull him to bed until they were tangled together; he whispered, smoothing his hair, “it’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”

“I was being stupid.”

“No, shut up.” He laughed, very quietly, “It was one of the very, very few smart things you said. Ever.”

“Fuck off.” Dean grumbled with no real edge. He took in the silence, the sound of Castiel’s breathing so near to his own, and he thought of how he couldn’t lose, not ever, not for any granted safety in the world. There wasn’t much to think in the end, he always knew he’d follow him, he always would. “How are you not scared?”

“Because,” he tucked his head in the spot he now almost always claimed, the space between Dean’s neck and shoulder. Dean felt he breathe in and out on his skin, as if he was inhaling Dean as some essential part of his system. “Because you’ll be with me.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from "There is a light that never goes out" from The Smiths, and it was kind of a theme song for this.  
> Kuddos and comments makes my day!


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